, ,\ Clockwise from right: Dr. Ken Alibek and William Patrick, . '.' '. .. photographed ",,::. by David Burnett; a member of the US. Army medical evacuation team during a contamination dril ' and a magnified view ø '\' of anthrax bacteria. nections to British intelligence and told him I thought I knew who No.2 was. He ff " D ' " h . d " I cut me o. on t say a name, e saJ. . can't confirm anything. Have you forgot- ten that we are talking on an open tele- phone line?" That source went nowhere, but then I had an idea. For several years, I have known a man named William C Patrick III, who in certain important re- spects is the leading American expert on } ,<' -, ,;, "" '" '1\' .; - ::' f; , <, . "', : .. -<<" :i ; ' t .:... ''\ \ '. , far as I can tell, the United States has no bioweapons, and one piece of evidence for this is that government officials today are remarkably ignorant of them.) Bill Patrick, who is now seventy-one years old, is one of only two or three sci- entists still alive and active in the United States who have a hands-on technical understanding of bioweapons. As he ex- plained to me, "There's a hell of a discon- -....,. U:":..: ... :: ': .;F\ ; . . "t.} ..; - 'b "'; (, :' ;:, M* l>> '. "'. "1 . . :i:::7=1 i-;'" :;; i:t 2 :;(^ " biological weapons. Before 1969, when President Richard Nixon shut down the American biowarfare program, Bill Patrick was the chief of product devel- opment for the United States Army's x biological-warfare laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The products" that Q- Patrick and his research group developed (/) were powdered spores and viruses that were loaded into bombs and sophisticated delivery systems. Patrick was arguably the top bioweaponeer in the United States. He ð and several hundred other scientists and research-staff members lost their jobs when Vi the biowarfare facilities at Fort Detrick 6 were closed down. (Today; to the best of my knowledge, the scientists at the United States Army Medical Research Institute õ of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, I at Fort Detrick don't make offensive : bioweapons. They develop vaccines and treatments to defend against them. As t .:j ......:....;>e::.. ...: .... ';4 't " . ...:-:.:':';;:ð"i:';: m {; '.\: .- "" "L ë; '"'+''' '" ....". :" "." - -. :;:.}; . : ."=.: ".. --7 nect between us fossils who know about biological weapons and the younger gen- eration." In 1991, on the eve of the Gulf War, he was summoned to the Pentagon to take part in a discussion of anthrax. Patrick sat in silence while a group of intelligence analysts, young men and women dressed in suits, discussed an- thrax in knowledgeable-sounding voices. "I reached the conclusion that these peo- ple didn't know what the hell they were talking about," Patrick recalls. He said, "Have any of you fellows actually seen anthrax?" and he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small jar of amber- brown powder, and hucked it across the table. It rattled and bounced toward the analysts. They jerked away; some leaping to their feet. The jar contained anthrax simulant, a biopowder that is essen- tially identical to anthrax except that it doesn't kill. It is used for experiments 53 in which properties other than infectivity are being tested. "I got that through security, by the way," Patrick observed. Later, Bill Patrick was the oldest United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. The Iraqis knew exactly who he was-the former top scientist in the former American bioweapons program. Iraqi intelligence people started calling his hotel room in Baghdad at night, . ... _n "lr, ,\ "'I>.: ,';:$' . ;:. . -,<, ..,j.. - . .. : . ,''"'<';;;,, r: v - ,.:' . . ...::: -=.: fc', '1'j";.V'."'" , \' ", ,," ")o .r', . " /' hissing, "You son of bitch, Patrick," and then hanging up. "It was kind of an honor, but it kept me awake," he says. Today, Bill Patrick is a consultant to many government agencies-the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the Defense Intelligence Agency; the City of New York-on the use of biological weapons in a terrorist at- tack. Jerome Hauer, who is the head of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's Office of Emergency Management-the group that would handle a bioterror event in New York, should one ever happen-said to me once, "Bill Patrick is one of the only guys who can tell us about some of these biological agents. We all wonder what we're going to do when he decides to light up a cigar and go sailing." Patrick is able to tell emergency planners what will hap- pen if a biological weapon is released in an American city-how many people will die, where they'll die, what the deaths